


even the darkness has arms

by etherealogie (library_lungs)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, I've been reading a lot of horror this month guys, Witch AU, ben sold his soul, questioning nun rey, witch/demon au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 01:55:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21007793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/library_lungs/pseuds/etherealogie
Summary: Witch/Demon AU. Rey is a novice at a cloister, but when she sees Ben Solo in a vision, the nephew of one of the monks who sold his soul to demons, she starts questioning her sense of right and wrong.





	even the darkness has arms

The first time Rey saw the demon, she tried to kill it. She at least had that to her credit.

She was in the rectory, not so much saying her prayers as taking the time allotted for them to be alone. Rey should be tired of being alone—up until a year ago, alone was all she knew—but she found she missed it. Missed numbering her minutes the way she chose, rather than the rigid schedule of the cloister. Prayers, breakfast, mending, prayers, cooking, prayers, sleep. All of it done in a group, under watchful eyes, but at least with her eyes closed she could pretend at solitude.

Her eyes weren’t closed when she saw him, though. Rey slit them open as she adjusted her knees on her prayer cushion, a threadbare thing that didn’t cut the rigidity of the stone in the slightest, and that’s when she saw the apparition, a broad-shouldered figure cutting through incense smoke. 

He was in his own world. That’s what it looked like, at least. A place of black walls and glass, a place of gleaming surfaces. It didn’t look like hell, but what did Rey know? She hadn’t found religion so much as it had found her, and their truce was uneasy, an exchange of words and rituals for food and shelter.

The demon looked at her. She had to think of him as demon, because surely it couldn’t be a man, appearing so out of thin air. He appeared as a man, though, one dressed all in black with hair to match, curling messily over his collar. A scar bisected his cheekbone, and his eyes were shadowed. He looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks.

Just so, in hell. Rey’s reaction was instinct. She grabbed one of the smoking braziers and hurled it through the air.

Surprise slashed across the demon’s face. Then he disappeared, as if he’d never been there at all, and Rey was facing only Mother Constance with her frowning, frog-like face.

That first encounter was what saddled her with Brother Luke. A devout man, a hermit, who was technically part of the cloister but lived outside it. He had his own little hut out on the moor, surrounded by heather and ragweed, and he only showed up when they made something he liked for dinner. But he was well-versed in dealing with demons, especially since his nephew had sold his soul to one long ago. No one talked about it outright, but the whispers had reached Rey in her first week as a novice.

The first time she went to Luke, he ignored her for a solid hour. Puttering around his hut, making tea so pungent she wrinkled her nose. Finally, he took the seat across from her, frowning through a thick beard. “Well then, girl,” he said, “what did you see?”

Rey twisted her lips, hands clenching around the rough clay of her teacup. The tea was disgusting, but she’d already drunk half of it. She still hadn’t shaken the habit of taking sustenance whenever she could get it. “I saw…um, he looked like a man.”

Luke grunted. “They do, more often than not. More details.”

“Dark hair. Longish. There was a scar on his face.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “He looked tired.”

He was handsome, too, but by Mary and Joseph, she wasn’t going to say that.

Luke’s fidgeting stilled. He didn’t look at her, but studiously at the table as he leaned forward, as if to hear her better. “Dark hair?”

There was an edge to the question. Rey nodded. 

“And his…his carriage.” Luke’s hands were so tight around his clay cup she thought it might shatter. “How tall? How broad?”

“Tall,” she said. “Very. And…uh, very broad.”

A moment of stillness. Then, Luke pushed away from the table so hard it rattled the crude cutlery, letting loose a string of curses that made Rey, a street urchin up until a year ago, blush. 

“He’s back,” Luke said, shaking his head. “He’s back, and looking for others to drag down with him.”

“Who’s back?” But she knew. Something in her knew. 

“My nephew.” He stared into the fire, arms crossed. “Kylo Ren.”

#

Kylo Ren.

That wasn’t his real name. Everyone knew that. But his true name, the one he’d shirked, that was harder to come by.

And she shouldn’t even be trying, Rey admonished herself, leaning over the spidery script in the cloister’s ledger. Learning his real name wouldn’t help her, wouldn’t banish him from her head. God, it might give him a stronger hold! And yet. Here she was.

The fallen boy was Luke’s sister’s child, and Luke’s sister was married to a Solo. This she’d found out through carefully placed questions to the other novices, as casual as she could make them. Those who knew were eager to share the gossip. Rey ran her finger down the carefully recorded names in the ledger, looking for Solo.

She found it, finally. Only one entry. Solo, Ben.

Ben. A saint’s name. Incongruous, for a boy who sold his soul to demons. 

She sat back in her chair, blew out a breath that tossed a tendril of hair up from her forehead. And when she looked up, there he was.

He still wore all black, a close-fitting jacket that showed the truth of what she’d told Luke—very tall, very broad. And he looked almost as surprised to see her as she was to see him.

Rey scrambled up from her chair, clutching the ledger to her chest as though it could be a shield. The demon—Ben—quirked a brow. “No braziers to throw this time?”

His voice sounded shivery, with a strange and shimmering echo. The other ambient noises of the room had faded away, leaving nothing but him.

She hitched the ledger higher. “I know who you are.”

“I’m sure you do.” He didn’t seem surprised, didn’t seem ruffled. “Did he tell you what happened? Luke?”

There was a strange earnestness to the question. As if he actually wanted the answer, didn’t just want to taunt her. Rey raised her chin to a defiant angle, though he’d have head and shoulders on her even if she stood on tip-toe. “Yes.”

His dark eyes raked her stance, the light in her eyes and the ledger held like a weapon. “No,” he said softly. Those shadowed eyes rose to hers again, and for a moment Rey was stricken with the intense desire to ask him when he’d last slept, if demons did such a thing. “No, he didn’t tell you. You should ask him.”

Then he turned, and he was gone, and she had nothing to mark his absence but her rabbit-rhythm heart.

#

So the next time she sees Luke, that’s what she did. Or, more accurately, she asked the mug of putrid tea he made over the fire and passed to her without looking up when she came into his hut. 

“What happened?” She said into her shivery reflection. “When B—when Kylo turned. Sold his soul.”

Luke looked over his shoulder, away from the pot of stew he seemed to always be tending. “Why does it matter?”

Rey shrugged, one lift and fall of her shoulder. “I was just curious.”

A moment, then Luke sighed, lumbering over to sit in the chair across from her again. “As long as you aren’t planning to follow in his footsteps,” he said, halfway joking, but the cut of his eyes was wary.

Rey fidgeted, a series of moments like a quirked smile and a half-shrug and a shift that added up to nothing.

Another sigh. Luke propped his forehead in his hand, his elbow on the table. “I sensed it,” he said into the murk of his hut. “A…a change in him, a turn. His heart was already dark long before he left.”

She thought of the man she’d seen, dark-haired and tired. She bit her lip.

Luke’s voice fell almost to a whisper, murmuring against the crackle of flames. “I couldn’t stop thinking about the damage he could do. The devastation he could bring upon us, the damnation.”

“What did you do?” Her voice was a scrape of sound.

“Nothing.” It came sharp and harsh, a rebuke without an accusation to answer to. “He tried to kill me. He pulled down half the cloister, with his new, hellish power. Then he was gone.”

Rey pressed her lips together. Then, she downed the rest of her tea in one gulp. “I should go.”

She was halfway out the door before he spoke again. “Rey.”

Her feet froze at the threshold. Rey looked back.

Luke still faced away. He stared into the flames and his ever-cooking pot of stew, the firelight carving deep furrows into his face. “I tried to save him,” he murmured. “I…I failed as much as he did, I think.”

There was nothing to say to that, not really. So Rey only hesitated a moment, lingering beneath Luke’s lintel, before stepping out into the heather and the fog.


End file.
